THE ZEEBRUGGE RAID ANNIVERSARY SUPPLEMENT, NAVY NEWS, APRIL 2008
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‘An immortal deed’ The Zeebrugge Raid ETERNAL WATCH NOISES IN THE NIGHT AN ENGLISH CRUISER! IN THE dark of a bitingly-cold April night, figures clad in thick coats covered by a canvas cloak paced up and down the concrete and granite structure, occasionally pausing to stand at a parapet and stare at the waves crashing below. The warm spring weather had given way to the return of winter. Rain fell incessantly. The bitter North Sea wind drove the damp cold down to the very bone. There was no noise this night, save for the waters of the North Sea breaking against the pillars and granite of this great triumph of Man over Nature. The Mole of Zeebrugge arched into the North Sea for more than a mile, a huge shield which protected a narrow lock and canal to the great city of Bruges. The Mole was more than a mere breakwater, more than a mere pier. It was a marvel of Victorian/Edwardian engineering, 80 yards across at its widest point, carrying a road and rail line, goods sheds, cranes and derricks, a railway station. To these peacetime features, the Germans had added at least half a dozen guns, bunkers, a flying boat base, barbed wire and machine guns. It wasn’t just the Mole which was a fortress. There was no coastline on earth better safeguarded by steel and concrete. Along a 15-mile stretch of Belgium’s shores, the Marinekorps Flandern stood watch with more than 225 guns – calibres ranging from small 3.5in to fearsome 15in. Fifteen batteries ringed Zeebrugge alone. They protected the lair of the beast, the home of Unterseebootsflotille Flandern, the Flanders U-boat Flotilla. The beast was safe in his lair: huge concrete ‘pens’ protected these undersea monsters from the guns of the Grand Fleet and the bombs of the newly-formed Royal Air Force. Even outside his lair, the beast seemed invulnerable. For every two merchant ships sunk in Atlantic waters by German submarines, at least one fell victim to boats of the Flanders Flotilla. But the beast had an Achilles heel. His lair was eight miles from the sea. A canal bore him from his pen to open waters at Zeebrugge. Block the canal and the beast would be trapped. It was too simple a plan for the ordinary German marine to comprehend. Rumours circulating the Marinekorps Flandern were far more grandiose, far more outlandish, far more believable. “Over there, on the other side of the Channel, they’re up to something,” the men convinced themselves. “Tommy is readying a great fleet – hand-picked assault troops and landing forces, 20,000 men in all.” Tommy would roll up the Flanders coast from east and west, smoking out every bunker, battery and dugout with flamethrowers. The men’s leaders did nothing to dispel or quash such rumours. Warnings from above merely confirmed the marines’ doubts: crews of coastal batteries shall die at their posts! But when? Not tonight. No tonight was like every other night in Flanders. The luminous hands of the guards’ wrist watches lethargically crept around. “Nichts Neue?” Nothing new? the guards asked each other as they passed routinely.
● ‘The one naval exploit of the war that moved and still moves the imagination of the nation...’ Blockships Iphigenia (nearest the camera), Intrepid and Thetis scuttled in the entrance to the Zeebrugge canal “Nein, nichts Neue.” It was now approaching 1am on Tuesday, April 23 1918 German time – a few minutes before midnight on Monday April 22 in Britain. One German sentry seized another. “Horch, didn’t you hear anything.” “There’s a growling noise somewhere.” It was difficult to distinguish anything above the crashing of the waves against the granite wall of the Mole. But the rumble grew louder, a constant, rhythmic sound, a noise made by Man, not by Nature. “That’s the sound of an engine,” a guard yelled. A star shell lit up the April night, slowly fading before being devoured by the grey-black heavens. The sentries stared out across the Mole wall. The rain ran in small streams down their faces. In the distance, somewhere over the horizon, a slight, brief flicker, then nothing. Seconds later a huge fountain of earth was tossed up as a shell crashed into a meadow behind one of the 15 batteries ringing Zeebrugge. “There! There! Alarm! Alarm!” Bunkers and dugouts along the Mole emptied as the men of the Marinekorps Flandern rushed for their guns. The men seized their binoculars and scoured the ocean, but all they could see was a billowing, surging mist which hid everything. Flares raced into the heavens but did little more than give the mist a yellow-brown hue. “Can you hear that?” one sentry asked. “The noise of engines. Utterly clear!” Alarm! In the signals bunker, a telegraphist hurriedly tapped out a curt message to headquarters: Z E E B R U G G E B E D R O H T. Zeebrugge in danger. The batteries on the coast opened fire, hurling a curtain of steel into the mist. The guns on the Mole joined in. The beams of lamps and searchlights danced in the April
night. Suddenly they caught a dark shadow, racing at full speed for the Mole. Alarm! Ein englischer Kreuzer! Thus began the first commando raid.
NEW MAN AT HELM BRAWN NOT BRAINS CORKING THE BOTTLE The old year had just three days to run as Roger Keyes waited outside the office of the First Sea Lord in the Admiralty. 1917 had not been a good year for the Royal Navy. The U-boat menace had seriously undermined public confidence in the world’s grandest navy. The submarine peril had cost the First Sea Lord his job. Lionised at the war’s opening as a 20th-Century Nelson, John Rushworth Jellicoe had failed to deliver a modern-day Trafalgar and then failed to counter the German submarine. Jellicoe buckled. The war was all but lost, he had warned the Cabinet that summer. Jellicoe’s pessimism and an increasingly hostile popular press forced Lloyd George’s hand. On the night before Christmas, the axe fell on the admiral. Into his shoes stepped Admiral Rosslyn ‘Rosy’ Wemyss, a rather affable, monocled chap. Wemyss was more courtier than sailor. He mixed in the right circles, he was a close friend of the king, he spoke fluent French, he could – and did – charm guests thanks to his talents as a raconteur. Wemyss was not a master of the battlefield. He did not pretend to be. But he sought men who would re-invigorate the Navy, and Roger Keyes was just such a man. Keyes was one of the Admiralty’s young Turks. ‘Action’ was Roger Keyes’ watchword. To every problem there was an offensive solution, the 45-year-old rear admiral reasoned as the Royal Navy’s Director of Plans. Keyes’ gaze fell upon the Dover Patrol, the command which barred the famous strait to the foe. Except that it did not. Too many U-boats were slipping through the elaborate
defences established by Vice Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, Keyes argued. And too little was being done about the lair of the beast. Roger Keyes demanded action. Bacon had dismissed a raid on Zeebrugge as dangerous and impossible which would achieve nothing more than posthumous medals for gallant young officers seeking immortal glory. To Reginald Bacon, there was only one way to bottle up the Hun in his hideout – build an impregnable wall across the canal entrance at Zeebrugge... but the Hun would hardly afford their foe time for such a move. Bacon was cool, rational, calculated. He possessed a brilliant mind. Keyes was everything that Bacon was not. He was dynamic, warm-hearted, enthusiastic, energetic. He was a man of deeds, not thoughts, a man determined to do “something striking and brilliant”. Rosslyn Wemyss needed such men. He called Keyes in to his office. “Well, Roger, you have talked a hell of a lot about what ought to be done in the Dover area, and now you must go and do it,” Wemyss told the young admiral. Keyes set about his task immediately. He turned night into day at Dover with elaborate series of searchlights, floodlights and pyrotechnics which illuminated the strait “from end to end as bright as Piccadilly”. Every imaginable vessel was pressed into service, ploughing the waters between Dover and Calais. The concentrated barrage worked – to a point; U-boat losses rose, but not dramatically... and not dramatically enough for Roger Keyes. There was an obvious solution: block Zeebrugge and Ostend. Reginald Bacon had dismissed the idea as sheer folly; “dumping down ships” would not bottle up either port. Keyes and his staff disagreed. As February 1918 drew to a close, their plans were ready – and they were elaborate: an old cruiser, Vindictive, would charge the Mole and disgorge a 900-strong storming party; submarines packed with explosives
would smash into the railway viaduct which linked the Mole with the shore and blow it up, cutting off the defenders and preventing reinforcements arriving. The attack on the Mole was elaborate, but it was also a diversion. The Zeebrugge raid would rise or fall on whether the Unterseebootsflotille Flandern was corked in its bottle. While fighting raged on the Mole, three blockships would charge around its tip, head for the canal entrance at full speed, then scuttle themselves. It was a plan, Roger Keyes believed, which was redolent of success. But if it miscarried? “If it fails, it will be better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all,” the admiral argued. It would not fail, for Keyes would see to it that the preparations were elaborate. Extra guns were crammed aboard the obsolete cruiser Vindictive: 11in and 7.5in howitzers, mortars, machine-guns in the foretop, plus a handful of pom-poms. The broadsides from this imposing arsenal would silence any foe on the Mole – but if a didn’t, there was a wall of protective steel which grew around most of the upper deck. An artificial wall of fog would hide her approach to the Mole. Ships in the attacking force were fitted with elaborate devices: powerful fans would blow a chemical – and rather pungent – concoction towards the shore, cloaking the force. Of course, no kindly German would allow Vindictive to come alongside the Mole and none would certainly help her berth. The solution was ingenious. Two huge grappling hooks were fixed to derricks fore and aft. The derricks would swing out over the Mole wall, the hooks – “like gigantic fish hooks five feet long” – would lower and dig into the concrete structure, fixing Vindictive in place. Eighteen boarding gangways barely two feet wide would then bridge the gap between the ship and the Mole. The assaulting troops would scurry across then climb down a 20ft parapet and attack their
allotted targets. If the grapnels were inadequate, Vindictive had an ace up her sleeve; two Mersey ferries, Iris and Daffodil, were hastily requisitioned, the prefix ‘HMS’ added – plus grappling hooks, steel plate, guns and other military kit. Like Vindictive, the two boats were expected to deposit troops on to the Mole. But if all else failed, they could push the cruiser against the Mole to hold her in place. Once the storming parties were ashore, they were certain to face a strong garrison of German naval infantry – the Marinekorps Flandern – and reinforcements would surely rush from the shore along the pier to bolster the defence. To stop them, Keyes proposed ramming two old submarines, C1 and C3, into the wooden and metal viaduct which linked the Mole with the mainland, then exploding the craft. All this would provide sufficient distraction to occupy the defenders while the blockships rounded the tip of the Mole. The cork in the Zeebrugge bottle came in the form of three obsolete cruisers with a combined age of more than 80 – Thetis, Iphigenia and Intrepid. The trio were expected to rush the narrow canal entrance then sink themselves at an angle, before their sailors abandoned ship and fled. Only single men could volunteer to crew these venerable vessels, Roger Keyes decreed. The war had created enough widows already without the need to offer more husbands for Death’s ravenous appetite.
‘REAL DANGER’ ‘A GOOD HAMMERING’ ELABORATE PREPARATIONS Throughout February and March dockyard workers in the Garden of England prepared the assault ships for their dangerous charge. As they did, men who had put their names forward for an “undertaking of real danger” began to arrive at Chatham. They found strange forms taking shape in the naval base. Vindictive bore little relation to the cruiser of old. A succession of narrow gangways were swung out along one side of the ship, held in place by a lattice of wires and chains, while the fighting top had turned into a steel dumpling. There were additional guns, demolition parties, flamethrowers. “Every mortal form of frightfulness” had been welded or fixed to the old hull, Surgeon G F Abercrombie observed. There was no denying that Vindictive was ugly, Able Seaman W Wainwright conceded, “a veritable floating fortress, a death trap fitted with all the ingenious contrivances of war that the human brain could think of. “We took unholy pride and a fiendish delight in her and if it were possible for men to love a ship, we loved her.” To engineer Lt Cdr Ronald Boddie, Vindictive “looked more like a Christmas tree than a cruiser.” Boddie was assigned to the lead blockship, HMS Thetis. If there was the whiff of death and glory about Vindictive, there was merely the whiff of death about the three antiquated cruisers picked to plug the canal entrance. The skeleton crews who volunteered for them were certainly disappointed; just days before they had served in the queens of the seas, the dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet. Worse was to come. Leave was cancelled and they were told nothing of their mission. Unsurprisingly, they grumbled and groused. Most men did not yet know what H Continued on page ii